CARIBBEAN SEA — The U.S. Navy on Monday confirmed it had reduced a third Venezuelan vessel to driftwood in what Pentagon officials are calling a streamlined new approach to maritime drug interdiction, one in which the boarding, the search, the warrant, the evidence, the indictment, and the trial have all been efficiently consolidated into a single Hellfire missile.
The strikes, which administration officials describe as a “series” in the way HBO describes a series, mark the third time in as many weeks that the United States has sunk a boat first and assembled the case against it in a press release filed sometime later that afternoon.
“We are highly confident every vessel struck was trafficking narcotics,” said a Pentagon spokesman who declined to identify the specific boats on the grounds that “honestly, they’re sort of the same boat at this point.” Asked what evidence supported the claim, he gestured at a satellite photo of the ocean and said the absence of the boat in subsequent photos was, in his view, telling.
The administration has so far declined to release names of the dead, the cargo manifests, the intelligence intercepts, the targeting rationale, or any document that does not consist entirely of the word “cartel” repeated in larger and larger fonts. A senior official familiar with the program said the legal framework was “being workshopped” and would likely arrive sometime after the boats stopped existing.
According to a memo circulated within Southern Command, vessels are flagged as probable narcotraffickers using a rigorous three-part test: the boat is made of fiberglass, the boat is in water, and the boat is operated by Venezuelans. A fourth criterion — actual drugs — was reportedly removed from the checklist last month for slowing things down.
President Trump praised the operation at a Monday gaggle, telling reporters the strikes had already prevented “trillions” of fentanyl from reaching American shores, a figure he confirmed was a feeling rather than a number. He added that the cartels were “shaking,” a claim difficult to verify given that the people aboard the boats were, by the administration’s own account, definitely cartels and definitely also dead.
Relatives of one of the men killed told reporters the deceased had been a sardine fisherman who left the harbor at 4 a.m. with two coolers, a thermos, and a portrait of his daughter taped to the dashboard. The State Department, asked about the discrepancy, issued a statement noting that sardines and cocaine are both, technically, found in the ocean.
Inside the Pentagon, officials say the program has been a runaway success by the only metric anyone is tracking, which is the number of boats that no longer exist. A planning document obtained by reporters lists the next phase as “Boat 4,” followed by “Boat 5,” followed by a section labeled simply “keep going.”
Legal scholars not currently employed by the Department of Justice have raised mild objections, noting that summary execution by cruise missile of unidentified persons in international waters represents what one called “a vibe shift” in U.S. drug policy. The White House dismissed the concerns, pointing out that the boats had multiple opportunities to not be Venezuelan and chose otherwise.
A fourth strike is reportedly already scheduled for later this week. Officials say the target has not yet been selected but expressed confidence that, by the time the missile arrives, it will have been a drug boat all along.